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DOE’s Final policy on fuel cycle fuel analysis

September 2, 2011

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced its final policy on incorporating full fuel cycle analysis. This form of analysis expands on the current way of estimating the energy savings of appliances by including the costs of everything from fuel extraction to distribution and also estimating the greenhouse gas impacts of the machine.

Policy Integrity submitted comments last October to the DOE in support of integrating full fuel cycle analysis in evaluating household machines. But our comments also critiqued the agency’s decision to relegate environmental data from the sticker to an obscure website, refuting the DOE’s claims that this would render the labels overly complicated and add little beneficial information.

The DOE addressed our comments in its final policy but ultimately decided not to incorporate environmental data into the labels.